The storage capacity of computers has increased to the point that general-purpose personal computers can now hold terabytes of digital data. Computer servers can hold considerably more. With such large storage capacities comes an increasing demand to effectively search this information. In recent years there has been an increased emphasis on effectively scanning computer hard drives. These scans are performed to locate relevant data as well as to manage system properties.
A wide variety of scans have now become common place. For example, Boolean-type key word searching can be used to examine the contents of a file and return contextually relevant files. Other searches can be carried out to locate specific file types and/or file names. These searches can be carried out over an entire hard drive or they can be limited to specific file paths. Searches of a computer registry can be preformed to detect hardware changes and/or updated software configurations. It is also now common place to perform scans to locate computer viruses or malware. These searches typically search a drive for signatures indicative of malware. All of the foregoing examples can be conducted one time, or they can be repeatedly preformed at specific times or after specific time intervals.
Complicating matters is the fact that the searches discussed above must be run on individual computers or workstations. This quickly becomes a cumbersome task when dealing with a large network having numerous computers. As a result, IT professionals within an organization spend large amounts of time running the same searches on separate workstations. Moreover, there is currently no means of ensuring that such searching is done in a uniform manner across all the computers in a network. Nor is there a means for monitoring the progress and/or competition status of searches across a network. Keeping track of search results is similarly complicated for enterprise level networks.
Thus, there exists a need in the art to permit computer searches to be easily created and configured. There also exists a need in the art to permit a single computer to initiate and monitor searches across a number different computers distributed over a computer network. There further exists a need to tabulate search results for searches performed across a network. There is still yet an additional need to permit all of the foregoing to be accomplished via an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). The system and method disclosed herein are aimed at fulfilling these as well as other needs.